Casino a bad bet for Toronto. “Toronto deserves a world-class casino,” city councillor and one-time mayoral hopeful Giorgio Mammoliti declared recently. Why? What did the good city of Toronto do to deserve such a costly, socially destructive boondoggle? Why would we allow as important a piece of waterfront property as Ontario Place to be turned into a gambling den — with all the glitz, tackiness, misery and crime that goes along with it? There are lots of things that economic development experts disagree about — whether it’s more important to create a better business climate with tax abatements or attract new residents with quality-of-life amenities; whether mass transit and bike trails or highways and stadiums deserve bigger subsidies. But about one thing, urbanists across the ideological spectrum are unanimous. And that is that building casinos, especially in an already thriving downtown, is a truly terrible idea.
And, yes, Toronto and the province are desperate for revenue. The Global Creativity Index - Jobs & Economy. Earlier this week I identified the world’s leading nations on innovation, technology and the creative class. Today, I turn to a new, more comprehensive measure of global economic competitiveness and prosperity my team and I have created, the Global Creativity Index. The ongoing economic crisis has seriously challenged to the way we understand and measure economic growth.
An increasing number of economists, social scientists, and policy-makers suggest that traditional measures like Gross National Product have outlived their usefulness and have sought to replace them with broader measures of economic prosperity, sustainability, and/or happiness and subjective well-being. As Joseph Stiglitz put it: “What you measure affects what you do.
The Global Creativity Index evaluates and ranks 82 nations on Technology, Talent, and Tolerance, the three critical “Ts” of economic development. The map above shows how the nations of the world stack up on the GCI. The world's most creative cities. Multimedia showcase | Creative Class Group. The 7 Fastest-Growing Cities in the World - An FP Photo Essay. Shanghai Gets Supersized | Travel. Profile of Wang Fangqing. Paul Romer's radical idea: Charter cities. James H Kunstler dissects suburbia.